It seems to be a crazy year for celebrity deaths... it looks like even The Pope is finally giving out... Elliott Smith killed himself with "a single knife-wound"?? That is so strange. It reminds me a lot of Van Gogh's suicide. Most people know Van Gogh committed suicide, some people even know it was with a gun, but I'm not sure many people know he shot himself in the stomach and died, very deliberately, over the course of a couple days...
And just now I saw the Fred "Rerun" Berry died, a mere couple of weeks after I mention to Alisa that he was her "birthday buddy," a March 13th. He was only 52 but had a stroke recently and died from subsequent deterioration
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I wanted to watch a movie tonight, and picked out at semi-random one from the foreign new arrivals, Marooned in Iraq. I say semi-random because... well, I didn't just pick any movie, but I knew I wamted to avoid simply picking out one of the (apparently) many lascivious titles that are on that shelf now, like Sex and Lucia or The Piano Teacher (which seems mega-wacked-out, from reviews I've read on Amazon). I felt like seeing something a bit more profound, but hopefully not too much of a downer, and something from the Mideast (of which there also seem to be a lot out from right now, such as Kandahar.
I liked it quite a bit. It was a very straight, no-frills sorta storytelling. This old man, Mizra, wanted to see this woman, Hanareh, who later scandalized him by dumping him and leaving town with a fellow musician, Sayed, (most of the men in the film are folk-musicians), so he demands that his two sons, Barat and Audeh, journey with him to find her. He lies and tells them that she was still married to him, but actually she isn't.
The setting is Kurdistan, i.e. Kurdish Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq war and with ongoing bombing and gassing from Saddam's forces a continual threat through the whole film. The film starts out more lighthearted and fun, and slowly becomes more sad and tense, as 1) you see refugee camps, 2) you see hundreds of war orphans, 3) you see towns wiped out by Hussein's genocidal attacks, 4) you get the feeling that things with Hanareh and Sayed aren't too good, whenever or if-ever they find them.
Another shock is that the last half or so of the movie is spent in two-foot snowy mountains that look more like Switzerland than how we'd think of Iraq, where you've been hearing of 120-degree temperatures n such. The elements also add to the harshness of the journey and the tension added, with a whited-out, war-nightmare-ish setting closing in.
The last shot of the movie... I find it profoundly affecting. If it's pretty workmanlike direction through most scenes, I have to give praise to the handling of the last minute or so as something simple but special.
...also, Barat looks really cool in his shades. And Audeh... he is just so funny-looking, he cracks me up.
And just now I saw the Fred "Rerun" Berry died, a mere couple of weeks after I mention to Alisa that he was her "birthday buddy," a March 13th. He was only 52 but had a stroke recently and died from subsequent deterioration
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
I wanted to watch a movie tonight, and picked out at semi-random one from the foreign new arrivals, Marooned in Iraq. I say semi-random because... well, I didn't just pick any movie, but I knew I wamted to avoid simply picking out one of the (apparently) many lascivious titles that are on that shelf now, like Sex and Lucia or The Piano Teacher (which seems mega-wacked-out, from reviews I've read on Amazon). I felt like seeing something a bit more profound, but hopefully not too much of a downer, and something from the Mideast (of which there also seem to be a lot out from right now, such as Kandahar.
I liked it quite a bit. It was a very straight, no-frills sorta storytelling. This old man, Mizra, wanted to see this woman, Hanareh, who later scandalized him by dumping him and leaving town with a fellow musician, Sayed, (most of the men in the film are folk-musicians), so he demands that his two sons, Barat and Audeh, journey with him to find her. He lies and tells them that she was still married to him, but actually she isn't.
The setting is Kurdistan, i.e. Kurdish Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq war and with ongoing bombing and gassing from Saddam's forces a continual threat through the whole film. The film starts out more lighthearted and fun, and slowly becomes more sad and tense, as 1) you see refugee camps, 2) you see hundreds of war orphans, 3) you see towns wiped out by Hussein's genocidal attacks, 4) you get the feeling that things with Hanareh and Sayed aren't too good, whenever or if-ever they find them.
Another shock is that the last half or so of the movie is spent in two-foot snowy mountains that look more like Switzerland than how we'd think of Iraq, where you've been hearing of 120-degree temperatures n such. The elements also add to the harshness of the journey and the tension added, with a whited-out, war-nightmare-ish setting closing in.
The last shot of the movie... I find it profoundly affecting. If it's pretty workmanlike direction through most scenes, I have to give praise to the handling of the last minute or so as something simple but special.
...also, Barat looks really cool in his shades. And Audeh... he is just so funny-looking, he cracks me up.
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My full name is Carlos Filipe Pereira Medeiros.